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Jorge Bidarra
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Jorge Bidarra*
Universidade Estadual do Paraná
*
Associated Professor and Researcher in State University of Paraná (UNIOES-
TE. Postdoctorate at Federal University of Santa Catarina/Brazil (Center for Sign
Language Acquisition - NALS) and University of Sheffield/UK (Research Group
in Natural Language Processing) - 2013-2014. Cascavel, Paraná, Brazil E-mail:
bidarra@unioeste.br/jbidarra@pq.cnpq.br.
Esta obra está licenciada com uma Licença: Creative Commons Atribuição-
NãoComercial-SemDerivações 4.0 Internacional.
Jorge Bidarra
Introduction
reaching our set targets. For this task, dictionaries were used, as
previously mentioned, as well as assumptions as per the theories
of Lexical Semantic and Corpus Linguistics. The main goal
in this phase was, from the listed senses, to determine which
one would manifest in each of the sentences. For that, not only
ambiguous words were observed, but also the influence the words
that co-occured10 with them had over the manifested meaning.
According to the guidance proposed by Corpus Linguistics, most
of the so-called stop words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions,
pronouns, etc.) were discarded, to concentrate on the words of
open class or those referred to as “words with content” (nouns,
verbs, adjectives, etc.).
Given that the degree of influence the co-occurring words had
over determining the meaning of ambiguous words was often
different, they were separated into two major groups: strong co-
occurring and not-so-strong co-occurring. We referred strong co-
occurring to the ones that, in local context, could assure that a given
meaning, and not another, prevailed in that context. The words that,
although contributing to this determination, had a less impressive
performance were defined as not-so-strong co-occurring (the way
they were identified was the fact that, by themselves, these words
did not bear the same strength as the strong co-occurring ones). The
criterion used to identify which were co-occurring was that they
belonged to “conceptual organization of an activity or knowledge
field” (for instance, lexicon of fishing, lexicon of music, soccer, etc.)
– terminologies – or, that they were part of the same semantic field
of the ambiguous word.
Once the meaning was determined, the information was
attached to the ambiguous word in each sentence. In order to set
the difference among the three kinds of information mentioned,
we decided that those underlined would indicate the strong co-
occurring ones and those in italics as the not-so-strong co-occurring
ones and the notation <...> to explain the meaning taken by the
word in each of the different contexts. Below are some examples;
the ambiguous words are shaded in yellow.
- Banco
(1) Na praça, na igreja, num banco <assento> de jardim, é bom
sentar para descansar.
[In the square, at the church, on a bench <seat> of a garden, it is good to
sit
- Brilhante
(3) Conheça a estrela mais brilhante <cintilante> do planeta.
[Know the brightest star <shining>
- Processo
(5) A brincadeira é um dos mais importantes processos <atividade>
para fins de ensino e aprendizagem.
[Playing is one of the most important processes <activity>
in order to teach
(6) O processo <evolução, transformação> de amadurecimento acontece
ao longo de sua vida escolar.
[Maturing process <evolution, transformation>
•
processo
{ TRANSFORMAÇÃO
`%$\!{%$`|{\
• amadurecimento AMADURECIMENTO $`#%|\]
• acontece { ACONTECER `{=$&\
`
• ao longo de { FREQUENTAR ESCOLA DESDE-
• sua PEQUENO@
• vida [ATTENDING SCHOOL FROM AN
• escolar &$%$]&
Final considerations
Acknowledgements
Notes
1. We make a distinction between sense and meaning. For such we took the
theoretical view claimed by Vygotsky (1986), for whom the sense regards all the
psychological facts immersed in our consciousness (zones of meanings) and the
meaning would be part of these sense zones that the word has taken, within the
context of some speech together with other ones. In other words, the meaning
would be the most basic and unchanged semantic information that a word has,
regardless of the different contexts in which it manifests itself, while the sense is
given to the word according to the context manifested.
3. The words given in English are for reference purposes only. Any discussion of
these words in English is outside the scope of this research.
5. In fact, there are 4 words and not 3, because, besides the ones mentioned here,
we also worked with the sentences with the word “state”. These analyzes resulted
in a master thesis supervised by Jorge Bidarra, Keli Vidarenko da Rosa, the title of
which is: The impact of the Occurrence of Ambiguous Words in Portuguese in the
Translating Process to Libras, through Glosses: The case of the word “State”, with
public defense on 03/11/2014, at UNIOESTE, campus Cascavel/Paraná/Brazil.
6. Local Context is understood as the fact that co-occurring words are next to
ambiguous words in proximity. The notion of closeness, although it could imply a
direct connection between some, is less rigid. Generally, we consider close words
the ones which appear in the same clause or, at most, in two.
8. The proposed numbers to the word Sent., in brackets and at the end of each
sentence, indicate the number of the sentence in each of the attached files.
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